


Delicate Flower

by failytales



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Forbidden Love, Light Angst, Memories, One Shot, Reminiscing, Sorta kinda, Stream of Consciousness, sad dramatic lesbian bugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-18 01:02:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14842619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failytales/pseuds/failytales
Summary: The little ghost is gone, bearing away Ze'mer's gift to places half-remembered. Can it perform the task for which she herself never had the strength?





	Delicate Flower

Over the course of centuries, Ze’mer had lost her ability to shed tears.

She could still mourn, she knew. When the nights grew too quiet and lonely, her wails could still echo against the carved stone walls, penetrating the tombs below. When her hidden pocket of the vast cemetery felt stiflingly small, she could still draw whimpers out of her constricting throat. She could channel her grief in many ways, in fact; soliloquizing her comrade’s adventures to the stones, singing soft dirges as she sharpened her slowly-disintegrating nail, even tending the tangled and choked garden behind her hovel, despite the ache it brought to her chest. And yet, even when the memories caused her head to swim and ache with sorrow, no tears would come. Years of repression had turned into an eternal dull headache, now barely registered behind her temples. 

It had long ceased to matter to her, this peculiar dam in her psyche. It seemed so futile, to guess at such a minor malady. 

And yet, hunched over herself on the wrought iron bench outside her hut, she wondered for the first time in decades if it would be a relief. Tears, flowing freely down her shell, were they the answer to the anxious tension building in her body, which had only ratcheted upwards as the hours crawled by? Hours - No, surely it was days by now...Having long lost the need to track the length of her self-imposed exile, she couldn’t say. 

So long it had been gone - surely it would not return. It had no doubt clumsily crushed her gift in its claws, and would never show its face to her again in shame. Or else it had absconded with her gift, and given it to some other. Or perhaps it had sold it for geo. No, certainly, it had kept the precious gift to itself, a sorrow, a memory that was not its own. Her gift, her final goodbye, her love would never receive. 

The thought of the lonely, green-choked grave, visited not even by the deceased’s cruel kin, caused her throat to constrict, stifling the bitter moan in her chest. 

Why had she trusted it? The tiny ghost in the grey cloak, wielding the cracked nail, what had she seen in it? In this moment, back pressed to the cold iron, she could not say. Its eyes were soulless pits, dark and empty in its horned head. But then, surely this was not worse than eyes alight with plague? Eyes that stared bitterly, balefully up at her from cracks in the floor?

Maybe that was what had driven her to share her burden. Too long it had been since she laid eyes on another bug of whole mind such as her. The need to share, to commiserate, to hear herself validated in her centuries of sorrow? Was that it? She could have laughed, if she could remember how. Mere lack of conversation, causing her to spill her soul to a passing ghost...She did not have the strength of her youth, in many a sense. 

Shaking her weary head, Ze’mer stood, shuffling inside in a trance. The mirrors lining her walls were long blackened with age, but still she reflexively paused beside one. If she looked closely, sometimes, when passing lumaflies cast just the right shadow, Ze’mer could see her, glimpse the one face not lost deep within her clouding memory. She fancied she saw her love’s slender form standing tall and proud just over her shoulder, eyes alight with beautiful determination. In another life, could it have come to pass? Could she be living not alone, but with her heart, her dearest love? She had played out the scenario in her head dozens of times, seen the futility in ever possible outcome. Yet here she was, doing so once more. Ahh, how easy it was to dream...

What was this, though? The sound of tiny footsteps, ringing against the stones outside? No, no. Her fractured mind, it was playing tricks on her. It was the ring of water dripping onto the stones, or the movement of the poor souls below her feet, trapped between life and death. But the sound was growing louder, closer. Could it be…?

She lifted her gaze just as it came through the door. The same one? Yes, yes; it had the same horns, wore the same weathered grey cloak. It returned? But why..? 

Surely it had not...there was no way it could have…

And yet, here it was. It looked up at her, emotionless sockets boring deep into her soul. She shuddered, almost angry. What did it wish from her? Had it changed its mind, or did it merely wish to taunt her with its failure? She opened her mouth, but before she could speak, the ghost had begun to rifle through its cloak.

It did not pull out the flower, nor its remains. In fact, it took Ze’mer more than a moment to decipher exactly what it held. A pale fragment, glowing softly in the stifling darkness, so achingly familiar. 

Yes...her last gift, albeit an accidental one. Dropped in shock as she cradled her love’s body, depserately trying to think of how to stem the blood, fix her broken carapace, bring life back into her fading eyes.

It had done it, then. It had done what she could never do, could never have had the strength to do.

Ze’mer lowered her head, closed her heavy eyelids, and wept.


End file.
